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Karen Barad - Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance
Karen Barad - Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance
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Karen Barad
Abstract
How much of philosophical, scientific, and political thought is caught
up with the idea of continuity? What if it were otherwise? This
paper experiments with the disruption of continuity. The reader is
invited to participate in a performance of spacetime (re)configurings
that are more akin to how electrons experience the world than any
journey narrated though rhetorical forms that presume actors move
along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history). The
electron is here invoked as our host, an interesting body to inhabit
(not in order to inspire contemplation of flat-footed analogies between
‘macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds, concepts that already presume a given
spatial scale), but a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity – a
dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space,
entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense
of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity. There is no overarching
sense of temporality, of continuity, in place. Each scene diffracts various
temporalities within and across the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes
never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded
through one another. The hope is that what comes across in this
dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of intra-activity, of
are reconfigured within and are dispersed across and threaded through
one another. Multiple entanglements, differences cutting through and
re-splicing one another. The reader should feel free to jump from
any scene to another (is there any other way to proceed?) and still
have a sense of connectivity through the traces of variously entangled
threads and of the (re)workings of mutual constitution and unending
iterative reconfigurings (of sections, reader, writer, ideas, . . . ). My hope
is that what comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense
of différance, of intra-activity, of agential separability – differentiatings
that cut together/apart – that is the hauntological nature of quantum
entanglements.2
Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost. (From Hamlet, quoted in
Derrida 1994, xx)
I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should
choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its
direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in
a gaming house, than a physicist. (Albert Einstein, quoted in Shapiro and
Epstein 2006, 228)
unmoored – there’s no given place or time for them to be. Where and
when do quantum leaps happen? Furthermore, if the nature of causality
is troubled to such a degree that effect does not simply follow cause end-
over-end in an unfolding of existence through time, if there is in fact no
before and after by which to order cause and effect, has causality been
arrested in its tracks?
This strange quantum causality entails the disruption of disconti-
nuity/continuity, a disruption so destabilising, so downright dizzying,
that it is difficult to believe that it is that which makes for the stability
of existence itself. Or rather, to put it a bit more precisely, if the
indeterminate nature of existence by its nature teeters on the cusp of
stability and instability, of possibility and impossibility, then the dyna-
mic relationality between continuity and discontinuity is crucial to the
open ended becoming of the world which resists acausality as much as
determinism.
I don’t want to make too much of a little thing, but the quantum,
this tiny disjuncture that exists in neither space nor time, torques the
very nature of the relation between continuity and discontinuity to
such a degree that the nature of change changes with each intra-action.
Change, to the extent that any general characterisation can be given, is
a dynamism that operates at an entirely different level of existence from
that of postulated brute matter situated in space and time (e.g., existence
is not simply a manifold of being that evolves in space and time); rather,
what comes to be and is immediately reconfigured entails an iterative
intra-active becoming of spacetimemattering.
Quantum dis/continuity is the un/doing. (Even un/doing itself, as well
as the notion of itself.) Even its appellation is at once redundant and
contradictory: a smallest unit, a discontinuous bit . . . of discontinuity.
‘Quantum’, ‘discontinuity’ – each designation marking a disruption,
bringing us up short, disrupting us, disrupting itself, stopping short be-
fore getting to the next one. A rupture of the discontinuous? A disrupted
disruption? A stutter? A repetition not of what comes before, or after,
but a disruption of before/after. A cut that is itself cross-cut. A cut raised
to a higher power forever repeating. A passable impassability. (An
irresolvable internal contradiction, a logical disjunction, an im-passe
(from the Latin a-poria), but one that can’t contain that which it would
hold back. Porosity is not necessary for quantum tunneling – a specif-
ically quantum event, a means of getting through, without getting over,
without burrowing through. Tunneling makes mincemeat of closure, no
w/holes are needed.) A possible impossibility, an impossible possibility.
An ontological im/probability. Identity undone by a discontinuity at
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
the heart of matter itself. What spooky matter is this, this quantum
discontinuity?
And yet, Newtonian inheritance is not one but many. No unity can
hold, not from within or without, when restless spirits walk the night.
Act Scene . Learning Spirits: Indeterminacy, Quantum
Superpositions, Quantum Entanglements
SpaceTime Coordinates: undecidable spacetimes, superposition of
here/there-now/then, 1935 [Erwin Schrödinger’s paper on quantum
measurement, almost no one remembers any of it except for the one
paragraph on the cat] diffracted through, entangled with . . . times past
and times to come.
If it – learning to live – remains to be done, it can happen only between life
and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between the two,
and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only
maintain itself with some ghosts, can only talk with or about some ghost. So
it would be necessary to learn spirits. (Derrida 1994, xviii)
agree, but only after the state of the cat is observed. Before it is observed,
there is no determinate fact of the matter about its condition.
Once more, a bit more slowly. What is meant by ‘superposition’?
A quantum superposition is a nonclassical relation among different
possibilities. In this case, the superposition of ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ en-
tails the following: it is not the case that the cat is either alive or
dead and that we simply do not know which; nor that the cat is both
alive and dead simultaneously (this possibility is logically excluded since
‘alive’ and ‘dead’ are understood to be mutually exclusive states); nor
that the cat is partly alive and partly dead (presumably ‘dead’ and
‘alive’ are understood to be all or nothing states of affair); nor that
the cat is in a definitive state of being not alive and not dead (in
which case it presumably wouldn’t qualify as a (once) living being).
Quantum superpositions radically undo classical notions of identity and
being (which ground the various incorrect interpretative options just
considered). Quantum superpositions (at least on Bohr’s account) tell
us that being/becoming is an indeterminate matter: there simply is not a
determinate fact of the matter concerning the cat’s state of being alive or
dead. It is a ghostly matter! But the really spooky issue is what happens
to a quantum superposition when a measurement is made and we find
the cat definitively alive or dead, one or the other. By what law of the
universe does such an occurrence happen? How can we understand
this ‘collapse’ – or rather, resolution – of an ontological/hauntological
indeterminacy into a determinate state? Not by following Schrödinger’s
equation. Perhaps not by any calculable means whatsoever.
Quantum entanglements are generalised quantum superpositions,
more than one, no more than one, impossible to count. They are
far more ghostly than the colloquial sense of ‘entanglement’ suggests.
Quantum entanglements are not the intertwining of two (or more)
states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of
two-ness, and ultimately of one-ness as well. Duality, unity, multiplicity,
being are undone. ‘Between’ will never be the same. One is too few, two
is too many. No wonder quantum entanglements defy commonsense
notions of communication ‘between’ entities ‘separated’ by arbitrarily
large spaces and times. Quantum entanglements require/inspire a new
sense of a-count-ability, a new arithmetic, a new calculus of response-
ability.
suggest that this spooky action in a way might work even beyond the grave,
with its effects felt after the link between objects is broken . . . memories of
entanglements can survive its destruction. (Choi 2009, 24)
It’s quite uncanny. During the early years of the twentieth century
evidence came to light that light is . . . well, it behaves like a particle
(after all – the position Newton advocated) . . . except when it behaves
like a wave (as James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Young, and others helped
to demonstrate convincingly in the nineteenth century). And matter, it
most definitely behaves like a particle, . . . well, except when it behaves
like a wave. What nonsense is this? Has science lost its mind, gone mad?
Waves and particles are ontologically distinct kinds: waves are extended
disturbances that can overlap and move through one another; particles
are localised entities that singly occupy a given position in space one
moment at a time. Light can’t simply just be a wave and a particle,
extended and localised.
So much for the solid confidence, the assured certainty, the bedrock
consistency of science, at the brink of a new century. It was not merely
that new empirical evidence concerning the nature of light seemed to
contradict the established view, but during the first quarter of the
twentieth century, it became increasingly difficult to understand how
any consistent understanding of the nature of light could be possible.
Desperate to make sense of all this, Bohr makes one of the strangest
moves in the history of physics: he turns his attention to the question
of . . . language! (A respectable move for a scholar in the humanities,
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
Stage Left:
A ghost of Thomas Young and his famous two-slit experiment. The
two-slit experiment – the grand identity filter, the perfect litmus test of
the character of being, the greatest ontological sorting machine of all
time. Thomas Young is lecturing. Sound waves from the two speakers set
up at the front of the lecture hall form a sonic diffraction pattern so that
alternately spaced conic sections of the audience can hear Young’s voice
with clarity while the others sit with quizzical looks not hearing a word
and still others have their ears plugged because the sound is so loud as
to be unbearable. The words come clearly to those who are well-placed:
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
Some audience members clap when Mr. Young has finished. Others have
already left in frustration and have asked for a refund of the ticket price.
Someone notices that the remaining audience members form a pattern of
bands radiating outwards from the stage. Interested in this phenomenon,
she raises her hand, but Mr. Young has already disappeared.
Stage Right:
The lights go up on the house and reveal the ghosts of Einstein and
Bohr pushing away from the craps table, where Einstein, with unchecked
disdain in his voice, reports that some physicists claim they saw God
playing there. Einstein has had enough. They mosey on over to another
table and quickly fall into the groove of an old conversation.
The table in front of them sports a two-slit apparatus at the very
center of their imaginations. They are performing gedanken or thought
experiments with the two-slit apparatus. The stakes: nothing less than
the nature of reality. Einstein is getting irate. Bohr insists that using
a two-slit apparatus he can show that with one arrangement of the
two-slit apparatus light behaves as a wave, and with a complementary
arrangement light behaves as a particle. He explains that entities are
not inherently ‘wave’ or ‘particle’, and that it is possible to produce
wave and particle phenomena/behaviours/performances when the entity
in question ‘intra-acts’ with the appropriate apparatus. Einstein picks up
a large stack of chips, neatly arranges them in his hand, and confidently
places them on the table. Bohr says he will bet against Einstein, but he
keeps talking without laying down any determinate number of chips in
any particular spot.
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
Both Bohr and Einstein agree that entities, like photons, atoms, and
electrons, exhibit a diffraction pattern, characteristic of waves, when
sent through a two-slit apparatus. What they disagree about is what
would happen if the apparatus is modified in such a way that it would be
possible to detect which slit a given entity had gone through on its way
to the screen. Einstein, who rejects quantum theory and is committed to
holding onto a classical ontology, argues that this experiment would
catch the entity in the act of behaving like a particle at the slits
and behaving like a wave at the screen – exposing the deficiencies of
the quantum theory. Bohr adamantly disagrees. He argues that with
the which-slit apparatus in place the entity would no longer behave
as a wave – that there would no longer be a diffraction pattern on
the screen. Bohr’s exuberance is hard to contain as he explains that
Einstein’s which-slit experiment beautifully demonstrated his Principle
of Complementarity according to which an entity either behaves like a
wave or a particle depending on how it is measured. Einstein is losing
his patience.
Heisenberg, seeming to come out of nowhere, slips in between them
and remarks that he agrees with Bohr that the moment you try to
reconfigure the apparatus to detect which slit it goes through you will
disrupt the entity whose characteristics you set out to measure. The
result will be that light will no longer behave as a wave, but rather
a particle. Heisenberg sets off in another direction once he finishes.
As he leaves Bohr shakes his head insisting that he and Heisenberg
actually don’t agreed at all. Bohr mumbles something about Heisenberg
believing that the pattern changes because in the act of determining
which slit it goes through the which-slit apparatus disturbs what would
have happened in the absence of such a measurement. Einstein long ago
stopped listening, but Bohr forges on. The point, he argues, is not that
measurements disturb what is being measured but rather what is at issue
is the very nature of the apparatus which enacts a cut between ‘object’
and ‘agencies of observation’, which does not exist prior to their intra-
action – no such determinate features or boundaries are simply given.
What results is an entanglement – a phenomenon. The performance of
the measurement with an unmodified two-slit apparatus results in a wave
phenomenon, while the measurement with a modified two-slit apparatus
(with a which-slit detector) results in a particle phenomenon. There is no
contradiction, Bohr insists. Classical metaphysics has misled us. Entities
do not have an inherent fixed nature.
Einstein’s reverie is broken by this last comment. Exasperated he
asks, ‘So what you are saying is that the very nature of the entity – its
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
*
Acknowledgements
My debts are many. To name a few: I am grateful to Fern Feldman for
her patient reading of the many versions of this paper and for her helpful
suggestions and comments. Thanks to Irene Reti for suggestions on an
earlier draft. I am indebted to Vicki Kirby and to Astrid Schrader – to
each, for her inspired materialist reading of Derrida that makes this
engagement possible. Many thanks to Nicole Anderson for her fine
editorial advice in helping me to tame a much longer version of this
paper. Thanks also to Mike Fortun for quickly beaming me a copy of
his ‘Entangled States’ paper as I was finishing this article and suddenly
remembered his paper on science, responsibility, and quantum goulash.
I had already marked the sections with SpaceTime coordinates before I
looked (back) at his paper. Entangled States, indeed!
References
Barad, Karen (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Choi, Steven (2009), ‘Quantum Afterlife’ Scientific American, 300: 2, pp. 24–25.
Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning, & the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, New York:
Routledge.
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
Notes
1. Intra-action is a key concept of agential realism (Barad 2007). In contrast to
the usual ‘interaction’, the notion of intra-action recognises that distinct entities,
agencies, events do not precede, but rather emerge from/through their intra-
action. ‘Distinct’ agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute sense,
that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they
don’t exist as individual elements. Importantly, intra-action constitutes a radical
reworking of the traditional notion of causality.
2. This paper is diffracted through Barad (2007). The reader should keep in mind
that there are multiple interpretations of quantum physics. This paper makes
use of my own reading and interpretation of quantum physics given in my
book. For other readings of quantum physics and deconstruction see works
by Arkady Plotnitsky, Christopher Norris, and John Protevi, among others.
For more on the method of reading insights diffractively through one another,
see especially Chapter 2 of Barad (2007). Due to space limitations and the
minimalist approach to footnotes by this journal many footnotes were deleted.
I refer the reader to Barad (2007) for further details and more complete
references. This paper highlights material covered especially in Chapter 7. This
paper is an excerpt of a longer work in progress.
October 28, 2010 Time: 09:19am drt081.tex
3. ‘ “Fits”, “passions”, and “paroxysms” are all legitimate Newtonian terms for
easy reflection and transmission of light’ (Shapiro 1993, xii). Newton argued
that light is a particle.
4. David Mermin (1985) suggests that spooky-action-at-a-distance be understood
as passion-at-a-distance.
5. Quantum entanglements between La Palma and Tenerife in the Canary Islands
(a distance of 144 kilometers) have been experimentally confirmed. See Choi for
references.
6. For more details see Barad (2007) Ch. 7.
7. ‘HAMLET: Speak; I am bound to hear.’ Taking someone/something at its word
entails material obligations, being bound by responsibility. Making sense is
after all a material matter, especially if materiality isn’t the closed and limited
set Newton, or even Marx, had imagined, and meaning isn’t taken to be
merely a matter of language, but rather of a general textuality (see esp. Kirby
forthcoming). See Barad (2007) for performative (intra-active) reworkings of
materiality and discursivity. These rearticulations are assumed in this article.
8. In particular, contra Frayn, the point is not about discovering a past that has
already happened, but rather about the entanglement of past-present-future
here-there, that is, about responsibility and justice-to-come. So for example, the
point is not that Heisenberg’s motives were not merely unknown to him, but
that they were multiple, indeterminate, spooked, not his alone.
9. Agential cuts never sit still; they are iteratively reworked. Inside/outside is
undone. Constitutive exclusions are both the conditions of possibility for
openness, for reworking im/possiblities, and are themselves always being
reworked as part of this reiterative dynamics. An uncanny topology: no
smooth surfaces, willies everywhere. Differences percolate through every
‘thing’, reworking and being reworked through reiterative reconfigurings of
spacetimematterings – the ongoing rematerialisings of relationalities, not among
pre-existing bits of matter in a pre-existing space and time, but in the ongoing
reworkings of ‘moments’, ‘places’, and ‘things’ – each being (re)threaded through
the other. Differences are always shifting within. Intra-actions don’t occur
between presences. Intra-actions are a ghostly causality, of a very different order.
10. Levinas’s point that ‘ethics . . . does not supplement a preceding existential base;
the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility’
(Levinas 1985, 95) is pertinent here. See Barad (2007) for an elaboration of this
Levinasian intervention without the humanist foundations that have been an
integral part of Levinas’s philosophy.
11. The very dynamism of matter (unto ‘itself’, as it were, without the need for
some supplement like culture or history to motor it), its agential and affirmative
capacity for change with every doing, is its regenerative un/doing. Matter is
always already open, heterogeneous, noncontemporaneous with itself. Matter
is always shifting, reconfiguring, re-differentiating itself. Deconstruction is not
what Man does (it is not a method), it is what the text does, what matter
does, how mattering performs itself. Matter is never settled but is agentive and
continually opens itself up to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings.
Matter is ongoing hauntological transformation. Nature is not mute, and culture
the articulate one. Nature writes, scribbles, experiments, calculates, thinks,
breathes, and laughs (see esp. Kirby forthcoming and this volume).
12. Possibilities aren’t narrowed down to one in the realisation of some possibility
as an actuality. Rather, im/possibilities are reconfigured and reconfiguring with
each intra-action.